MIRA

MIRA is a mind-bending psychological short film about a marine intern who risks everything to keep her dream job illustrating the life-cycle of the immortal jellyfish, while her supervisor, a renowned stem-cell researcher, willingly turns a blind eye. Both desperately conceal shared secrets until tragedy forces them out of hiding. Will they find the regeneration they desire? MIRA was awarded a Sloan Production grant to be produced at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

MiraFlux

MiraFlux is a visualization of energy usage within USC’s 2013 Solar Decathlon house.The technology and visualization are driven by Solar Decathlon power. The system is especially unique in that it demonstrates how a robust entertainment experience can easily be powered by green energy.

Jen Stein, iMAP Media Arts + Practices alumni & colleague from the MEML Mobile & Environmental Media Lab, approached Amanda with the opportunity to feature and further develop the Miralab visualization environment as part of a collaboration between Jen at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, the USC School of Architecture, and fellow iMAP colleague, Adam’s game company, Rust Ltd. Anton Hand from Rust developed some pretty remarkable new underwater models, particles, and shader effects for MiraFlux, will eventually be added to the Miralab game.

This was a great opportunity to participate in a new collaboration that relates to the MiraViz project through applying its principles of building sensor visualization to a home environment.

MiraFlux

MiraFlux 3

MiraFlux 1

MiraFlux 2

MiraViz

MIRAWORLD Part 1 (MiraViz) is a visualization of user activities within the University of Southern California Cinematic Arts SCI building.

Users download an Android app on which they create a profile and update information such as their mood and type of activity. The app also does indoor localization* via Android wifi triangulation.

A server database collects the user information, and additional smart sensors readings (such as building temperature) and then sends all this to be visualized within Unity3D. The virtual world is mapped to and has an intimate and mostly direct relationship to events and activities within the physical world. Users are jellyfish avatars within an aquatic world.

This project is inspired by Amanda’s interest in using real-world activity to drive a multi-user shared responsive landscape. It reflects activities, moods, and the health and wellness temperature of a building’s inhabitants. Though it rests upon complex indoor location tracking technology, its primary goal is to use this information to 1) visualize collective data-based landscapes and 2) to provide a new model for systemic location-based play.

Next steps: integrate animations, playful avatar deviations through AI, line tracer to show pathways, ability to embed notes and photos

Here’s a play-through of the 1st version. Now we’re developing it to be more mobile while we wait for the lobby touch-screens to be fixed. :0

3D Printing for Stop-Motion

For my stop-motion animation film, The Reality Clock, I experimented with creating props using 3D printing.

I modified a phonograph model from a previous film, Goodbye Heart, as part of a 3D printing workshop taught by Kurosh ValaNejad at USC. The resulting ceramic material print was delicate and required quite a bit of sanding, repairing, painting, and modification with miniature brass tubing, to achieve the final look. While it was worthwhile to learn the process, 3D printing was just as, if not more labor intensive than creating the model by hand would have been. However, this process would be useful for creating complex organic shapes that need to have perfect dimensions, or for replacement-animation pieces, such as were used in Coraline.

PUCK Data Trees (3D Printing)

This collaboration provided an opportunity to incorporate Jen’s design of a data visualization tree into the development of a simple playful 3D tree, while learning the technology involved with producing 3D Prints. We considered how user activity within the USC Cinematic Arts complex, as measured with the PUCK iPhone application, would correspond to growing branches and flowers on the tree over time. Each branch represents a week. Its length corresponds with time spent in the building. Flowers petals reflect days within the week, while bumps on the tree represent features engaged within the application. Throughout the building, iPads display 2D animated visualizations of related data. The 3D print is a bonus souvenir and toy artifact which the building gifts to users after they have interacted with it for a certain amount of time. July 2011.

Rain Reflection

A despondent man encounters a new perspective through a a raindrop's reflection.

VR Shoulder Exercise Game

This video, from August 2011, demonstrates pilot VR research and games prototyping being developed in relationship with OPTT-RERC. I worked as a research assistant on this initial phase of the project.

MEML Design Fiction Comics

The Mobile & Environmental Media Lab worked with illustrator, Bryant Johnson, to develop a series of Design Fiction comics for a Mini Cooper ambient storytelling project.

I worked with MEML as a research assistant in summer 2011. We developed a series of in and out of car interactive experiences designed to deepen driver engagement with their car as a vehicle for mobile storytelling.

The comics were developed to illustrate certain types of experiences as part of a larger design document book and presentations.

AR Mini

Scavenger Hunt 1

As a couple step inside their new Mini Cooper for the first time, they are led through a scavenger hunt type puzzle within the car’s interior. The pieces encourage the drivers to explore the features of the car, initiating them into a new relationship with the car as a vehicle for playful interaction. The puzzle leads the drivers to name their car, further personalizing the experience, activating the mobile application, and developing the storytelling environment.

Scavenger Hunt 2

Scavenger Hunt 3

Unexpected Achievement 1

While washing Nigel, the family car, for the first time, a son and his mother realize that the son has unlocked an unexpected life-log achievement. As the relationship between Nigel and driver develops, the mobile application cues the driver to unexpected moments which are meaningful to Nigel, enhancing the sense of car as character.

Unexpected Achievement 2

Déjà vu 1

As part of the life-log application, drivers can take and view embedded photos, pinned to GPS map locations. Here, the application cues a daughter to find a location where her parents had previously placed a photo. Through searching this personal family archive and adding her snapshot, she is led on a tour through both actual and historical space, guided by photos.

Déjà vu 2

Déjà vu 3

Sympathetic Mirror

I considered possible implications for exposing typically hidden measurable body states to others. What happens when others know how your heart-rate changes when they are talking to you? How might this information be expressed and shared in a more playful manner? How might users interact if they are “trying” to synchronize their heart-rates? May 2011.

I created a 3D printed amulet with multi-colored LEDs which pulsed at different rates and colors reflecting the average speed of the wearer’s heart-rate.

I didn’t create good documentation for this, since it was a pretty rough prototype overall. However, below demonstrates some of the various processing screenshots and odd sounds created by the heart-beat levels.

Kaleidoscope Shooter

Teddy Bear Vision

This shows the basic set-up for the teddy bear, arduino, processing project. There are 2 processing sketches, one is image manipulation of what the viewer sees, and the other represents what the bear sees. I set up the animations based on breaking up the visual system into layers.

Teddy Bear Vision -- Arduino Experiment

2010

Teddy Bear Vision -- Processing Render

This is a direct render from one of my processing sketches based on a recent arduino project involving a cyborg teddy bear. In the actual project, various animations of are triggered by the distance to the teddy bear. Other screens play images of what the teddy bear sees, with further image manipulation.

LED Coral Reef

Kyla Gorman and I made this light sculpture as a prototype to simulate a piece of underwater coral reef, and to imagine what this bioluminescent world might feel like from an abstract point-of-view. We primarily used LEDs & photosensors. 2010.

Coral Reef LED Prototype

Tweet Jockey

Lauren Fenton, Diego Costa, and I created an immersive participatory live 12 screen Video Jockey experience using MAXmsp. Our program combed through live-tweet feeds using specific keywords. At stations, participants could curate the tweets, perform live-tweets through reading them on camera, curate how the performers were displayed through adjusting post-processing and mixing the videos, or video jockey keyword related youtube videos. The video jockey stations were located at different places within the building so that some performers participated in isolation (like how tweets are often created) and others were physically in the space.

2009 - Created as a 3 week exercise during Tracy Fullerton's Game Design Workshop @ USC

Untitled

Poddles

Poddles is a rapid prototype that Lauren Fenton, Meryl Alper, Harsh Vathsangam, and I designed for the 2011 Annenberg Symposium at USC.

These digital toy blocks have embedded LCD touch screens which respond to one-another. Users can draw or download pre-made animated designs which can move between screens and respond to user movements such as touching other blocks, shaking, spinning, stacking, etc. The blocks encourage an integration between digital, virtual, and tangible play.

Encircling

In connection with “108″, I created a series of related sand-rose sculptures, a bouquet of thorny roses and red-dyed petals. Here is an installation near modernist reflecting pools as part of the Dharma Art exhibition at local meditation center, Shambhala.

At the time, I was working with over-the-top goth-romantic imagery, inspired by doodles I had made in the margins of poetry notebooks from the summer when I was 14. Sigh.

Encircling with Love

Sand Sculpture

108

I created a mandala of 108 roses out of a homemade beach-sand-based clay as a ritual action to contemplate heartbreak.

These pictures are from when I installed these as part of the Art Festival at the L.A. Shambhala Meditation Center in 2007. My intention was to film these dissolving into water using time-lapse photography. As it turned out, the black paint acted like glue. And so it goes, heartbreak itself couldn’t be made to be beautiful, but the context nevertheless was.

Paper Tiger

My very first animation. After Effects. 2005.

Paper Tiger

Watercolor Doodles

I used to paint and draw daily, cranking out tons of colorful images, filling sketchbooks. These days, I've replaced that habit with writing. Kinda miss it, though!